While primary keys are generally considered a necessity when it comes to relational databases, they’re usually included in the SQL code that creates the database table.

MySQL 8.0.30 introduced generated invisible primary keys which provide an alternative to explicitly specifying a primary key for a table.

A generated invisible primary key (GIPK) is a primary key that’s created implicitly by the MySQL server. If we create a table without an explicit primary key, the MySQL server automatically creates a generated invisible primary key for us (assuming it’s an InnoDB table and that GIPKs are enabled).

MySQL has a SHOW CREATE DATABASE statement that shows the CREATE DATABASE statement that would be used to recreate the database.

We can use the SHOW CREATE DATABASE statement to create an identical database on another server, or to create a similar database on the same server (while changing the name).

We can alternatively use SHOW CREATE SCHEMA to do the same thing (SHOW CREATE SCHEMA is a synonym for SHOW CREATE DATABASE).

In MySQL, we can use the SHOW CREATE TABLE statement to produce a CREATE TABLE statement from an existing table.

This enables us to generate a script that we can use to recreate the table on another database, or on the same database at a later date. Or we could use it to create another similar table. We would need to modify the code accordingly when doing this, but it could give us a good starting point.

We can also use SHOW CREATE TABLE for a quick way to take a look at the table’s structure, and check for things like data types, primary keys, foreign keys, etc.

MySQL provides the sql_quote_show_create system variable, which allows us to specify whether or not to include quotes around identifiers when using the SHOW CREATE TABLE and SHOW CREATE DATABASE statements.

By default, this variable is set to 1, which means that quotes/backticks will be generated whenever these statements are run.

However, we might not always want quotes or backticks around the object names, and so we can change the value of this variable to disable quoted identifiers.